Spending some time today trying to beef up my home library following fantastic advice @sniphist gave me last year that bears repeating, particularly for PhDs/ECRs in the current climate:

every few months, give yourself a budget of whatever-you-can (for me its usually around £20-30) and trawl through ebay/booksellers to find preowned works related to your topic. I have been steadily building my collection and don't think I've paid more then £8 for a text!

you find the *WEIRDEST* stuff, but also seminal works for hella good prices AND SOMETIMES really unique primary sources. You'll be surprised what people sell.

PhD students/ECRs particularly rely on the university library/institutional access. We haven't had the time or resources to buy texts that we need and right now, for me, that is particularly daunting. But today I picked up 5 top books for my subject, for £25.

If you (like me) haven't been able to focus on work these past few weeks, and have saved a few pennies by not going to the pub as much (guilty!), spend some time looking through the World Wide Web and see if you can pick yourself up a bargain or two today!

BEWARE - I told you there was some nonsense kicking around. Filed under "Takes Absolutely No One Needed'